The guy was early middle-aged, with short, spiky, grey hair and a bristle-covered jaw. He wore a brown uniform, but the tunic, which had bus driver identification badges down its left lapel, hung open on a crumpled, spittle-stained shirt. His eyes, reddened with broken capillaries, bugged horribly from their sockets, and his mouth, still coated with bloody froth, yawned at impossible width. As the bus changed direction again, his head lolled, exposing a livid bruise, so purple in parts that it was almost black, completely encircling his neck.

Even though O’Grady had seen death before, he couldn’t help screaming. It wasn’t so much the horror of what had been done to this guy, it was the horror of what it meant.

He descended the spiral stair in leaps, and at the bottom almost fell over. The bus had now emerged from the housing estate and had already passed the point on Darthill Road where it became Pimbo Lane. They must be doing 50mph, the vehicle rattling and banging and bouncing over dips in the road. O’Grady staggered towards the front, shouting incoherently, where, to his astonishment, he saw that the driver was a young girl, no more than nineteen years old. She wore black military-style apparel, her blonde hair hanging in sweaty ringlets over a face that was puffy and swollen.

‘What in God’s name?’ he shouted, unsure whether he could be heard through the Perspex wall shielding her from the passenger area.

She grinned slyly as she turned the heavy wheel, the bus screeching around a wide bend. It was all O’Grady could do not to fall full length. He steadied himself and shouted at her again. ‘Stop this crate! Stop this damn crate!’

She didn’t even look at him, just grinned all the more.

He pulled the Taurus and pointed it at her with both hands. ‘Stop this bus now, or I’ll kill you.’

She ignored him. She wasn’t to know that he lacked bullets, of course, but maybe was taking a chance that the Perspex had been reinforced against robbers and other hoodlums. Only a narrow slot, where money was exchanged, allowed actual access, and that was at waist-level, so he could hardly point a gun through that.

‘Stop the damn bus, you bitch!’

Again, as often had been the case in O’Grady’s life when his blood was up, he made errors. On this occasion, as he raged at her and hammered the butt of the pistol on the Perspex, he didn’t notice the drape on the under-stair baggage compartment slither back and a second female slide out from it while at the same time drawing a taut wire from the big, chunky ‘KGB watch’ that she’d purchased on the Dark Web.

He only realised she was there at all when she looped the high-tensile necklace over his head – and cinched it tight.

Chapter 32

‘Lucy, you going home?’